Creating a Stir With Top-Shelf Sales Analytics

A Premium Blend Of Data-Driven Insights

Built on and embedded in the Salesforce platform, GreatVines helps customers focus their sales teams on two types of indicators:

• Leading indicators: Activities that drive the brand’s execution, such as a tequila brand being highlighted on a restaurant’s margarita menu
• Lagging indicators: Transaction-oriented results such as shipments (from supplier to distributor) and depletions (from distributor to retailer)

“We not only help our customers track leading and lagging indicators — we help them understand how one affects the other,” says Collins. “For example, we can show wine distributors how restaurants that offer a certain wine by the glass drive more revenue, and how much more revenue, than those who only offer it by the bottle. We can show them a scorecard that proves they’re doing better in all the markets where that wine is being poured.”

GreatVines also helps distributors track and influence pricing with their accounts. “When you look at sales alone, all you see is that certain accounts bought your products,” Collins explains. “The accounts determine the price that the end customer pays — there is no MSRP. Our system can help the distributor see the optimal price point for maximizing their revenue; then they can work with their accounts to influence those pricing decisions.”

Adding to the Mix

Before partnering with GoodData, Collins and his team relied on Salesforce’s native analytics, and the features that customers were requesting quickly surpassed those capabilities.

“Distributors want to work with companies that provide the best insights,” says Collins. “We knew that if we were the only company providing the analytics that can give customers deep insights and point them in the right direction, that would give us a huge competitive advantage and open up a new revenue source.” Collins and his team set out to find a cloud-based solution with the ability to integrate with and embed into Salesforce. Customers had always accessed GreatVines through a tab in their Salesforce dashboards, and they wanted that convenience to continue.

“We also needed flexibility in allowing customers to filter by container types,” Collins recalls. “They need to be able to see their results by the barrel, by the case, and by the liter. In addition, different customers have different fiscal calendars, which we need to be able to accommodate.”

A final requirement was scalability. “We wanted a solution that could start small and grow with us, without a big up-front commitment,” says Collins.

Ready to Serve

GreatVines began a partnership with GoodData in 2011, and the system took only a couple of months to implement.

“We respect GoodData’s commitment to innovation, and they really listened to our needs — which, of course, come from our end users,” says Collins. “They became a true partner and provided all the training we needed to manage the implementation ourselves.”

Savoring the Outcomes

“Working with GoodData has opened a window to new ideas and capabilities,” says Collins. “We’ve been able to evolve our core product at no additional cost and offer some add-ons that create additional revenue streams.”

One of those add-ons is a new pricing tool that helps customers organize their pricing and their trade spends. The new solution includes a dedicated analytics component, which allows customers to monetize their analytics.

“We now have a whole roadmap of things we want to do — things that our partnership with GoodData has made possible,” Collins adds. “We’re working on adding scan data from supermarkets and other sources of sales information. We want to dig deeper into retailer sales to give our customers a more comprehensive picture of how their products get sold.”

As GreatVines continues to explore the possibilities of their new and improved solution package, the benefits of their partnership with GoodData are emerging in three key areas:

Revenue

• Partnering with GoodData has allowed GreatVines to create new revenue streams through premium add-on analytics products. “We’ve grown ten-fold since our partnership with GoodData began,” notes Collins.

Retention

• GreatVines now offers unique, customer-focused capabilities that give it a significant advantage over its competitors, providing customers with a strong incentive to continue our relationship.

Relationships

• GreatVines puts a significant amount of effort into understanding its customers’ needs. “We do a lot of customer surveys and business reviews so that we can get feedback,” says Collins, “and we use those results to drive product direction.” By listening and responding to customer needs, the company is able to build and maintain the solid relationships that drive referrals as well as repeat business.

By providing suppliers and distributors with the analytics they need to drive revenue — plus the option to sign on for additional powerful tools — GreatVines is transforming the way business is done in the alcoholic beverage industry. “We’re taking the guesswork out of the supplier-distributor and distributor retailer relationships,” explains Collins. “We’re enabling customers to see what works and what doesn’t, backed up by real data, so that they can partner with their customers to come up with win-win solutions.”

About GoodData

At GoodData, we believe that traditional data tools are no longer enough. Our Data as a Service (DaaS) infrastructure is the future of analytics: real-time, open, secure, and scalable. GoodData’s leading cloud native analytics platform gives our customers the flexibility to build and scale any of their data use cases; from self-service and embeddable analytics, to machine learning and IoT — while maintaining the performance, cost-efficiency, and easy change management of such a central and integrated solution.

GoodData has teams and data centers in the USA, Europe, and Asia, with customers including leading software companies (SaaS), global financial and payment institutions, and multi-brand e-commerce platforms.